Hello and welcome back to Magic Project: Omega!

Today is one of the bigger endeavors of making the set and that is doing the references to the five original Moxen and Black Lotus.

There was a lot of thought into how to bring these cards to the set and after some major thinking, I have settled on some designs that I feel alright about, but there could be some tweaks.

Let’s take a look at how I arrived to those conclusions.

Design Approach

This one was a tough nut to crack, especially because they are such iconic cards from Alpha that are some of the most recognizable in not just Magic, but card games as a whole.

Starting off with the Moxen, I went back and forth on looking to either make one card that was a universal Moxen or five cards that were one of each Moxen.

This was a tough choice, and one that could still change in the future, but I decided on making five individual cards rather than just one universal Moxen.

Now came into the next hardest aspect of that, how do I make five cards that are referencing the Moxen remotely fair, especially since those cards are very powerful.

One came with the rarity, making them Mythic Rare, which would mean that in a draft environment they would be harder to get. The next would be interaction, in that there needed to be a way that they could be interacted with before they started to become a problem.

After that was the restriction, which is what is keeping them from immediately becoming an issue, but not so much of a deterrence that they would be unplayable.

I came up with some designs that I like, but I think some minor improvements could be made for the future.

Then we come to the Black Lotus reference, which is difficult because again Black Lotus is the iconic card of Magic, so there had to be a way to make the card referencing Black Lotus strong, but not insanely busted.

The first thing was the avenues of restriction, one of which was making it a Mythic Rare and a legendary card so it wasn’t immediately abuseable.

Then came the what it did, and I looked at other Lotus cards to gain inspiration and then one hit. I looked at one particular Lotus card and thought that there was a way to iterate on that design while still being strong.

Cards

Here are the cards I came up with!

Let’s talk about the Mox Guardians first. The idea was that the Moxen can be something that a lot of decks can’t really interact with, so I thought that making them creatures would be more effective in making what would normally be very powerful cards into something toned down a little.

They also enter tapped with one stun counter on them, again set as a limiter in order to not get immediate value out of them. In concept it makes them much more useful as a way to get a Mox in play that needs to be answered in two turns, otherwise it would become a major issue.

The original thought was to have them enter with two stun counters, but I wanted to be some what playable so that they could be played on turn one and then be online by turn three to get a slight tempo advantage.

Now this doesn’t play well when you have multiple of them, but if all you are playing are tapped mana creatures with zero power in a deck, your opponent would probably find a way to beat you before they become active (hopefully).

I also opted in not making them Legendary creatures purely because of Commander reasons. Imagine a free mana rock in the Command Zone, that would be way too problematic.

I am willing to change some mana costs, power and toughness, and may even toy around with giving them additional abilities, but as they stand right now, they are just really cheap mana creatures with something delaying them.

Now onto Lotus Wreath.

This one was a bit of a pickle, until I saw Lotus Blossom, which adds petal counters to itself and can be sacrificed to add X mana equal to the number of petal counters it had.

I thought that was a neat design space to play around with and then the flavor of making a wreath out of Lotus Petals came to mind, which then gave me the thought of a powerful artifact that got better and better the more lotus counters were on the card.

So Lotus Wreath came into being, just a Legendary Artifact that enters tapped and when you tap it you add a lotus counter to it and then add mana equal to the number of lotus counters it has.

Yes it is a zero mana rock, but it becomes useful at turn two to slowly ramp you rather than being a huge burst immediately. It becomes a threat, but it also is restricted in that it can only adds mana of one color so this means that multicolor spells can’t be cast efficiently, but also rewards big mana spells to be played or a lot of spells to be played.

I do think that this is a pretty well designed reference to Black Lotus, and if anything I can tweak the mana cost and the enters tapped clause if it looks too strong.

I feel pretty good about these designs, with the Mox Guardians maybe needing a bit of tweaking in the future, but overall I do think that these are solid designs.

Next up we are going back to commons of each color, but this time we are taking a look at instants and sorceries for each color starting with white. Each will get a certain number of instants and sorceries that will be showcased that I haven’t decided yet, some combination of each that equal six would probably work well.

Until than, thank you for reading, see you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual